Do you think Birmingham to Nottingham and Leicester should move to the West Midlands franchise?.
There's this awkward rump of services and I don't know which TOC they fit best into... BUT the news that Nottingham - Norwich is going to be a stand-alone service (rather than part of the Liverpool one) means I'd consider putting it into the same TOC as the two that you listed - that could be EMT but equally would make sense with XC (since they already run to Nottingham and East Anglia).
Should XC stop serving smaller stops, enforce pick up/set down only or opt out of local travelcard products to alleviate crowding around large cities?.
Ideally, but how?
They tried making Wakefield Westgate a "pick up" stop only on some services but it didn't work - Conductors can't get down a busy Voyager in the short duration, ticket barriers wouldn't know to reject anyone using XC on the kind of short flows I presume they are talking about (Manchester - Stockport, Birmingham - Wolverhampton, Leeds - Wakefield etc).
Also, a worrying precedent - what if other LDHS TOCs try this approach (since they'd rather have lucrative longer distance tickets than cheapo commuters on PTE-subsidised fares) and dump passengers on local services that can't cope?
Should the once or twice per day destinations be pruned from the network? Examples being Guildford, Bath Spa, Aberdeen, Cardiff via Bristol, Bournemouth, Cornwall too. Expected that local operators will fill in the gaps.
- Guildford - dump
- Bath Spa - dump
- Aberdeen - the one-a-day-at-lunchtime approach they previously proposed made sense - there's a lot of demand for longer distance services, esp at oil changeover times - but it means a unit being far from the "core", so using one in the middle of the day seemed a reasonable compromise
- Cardiff via Bristol - seems a bit token, but does provide capacity into Bristol in the morning rush hour (well, 07:51), so that might require replacement
- Bournemouth - keep
- Cornwall - keep as an early morning/ late evening use of stock
Given desire by other operators to run more services on the East Coast beyond Newcastle, should XC stop running one of the services as far? DfT envisage 2 hourly extensions to Glasgow to remain.
Leeds - Newcastle is two/hour with TPE (four times more frequent than before Operation Princess), Leeds - Edinburgh will be hourly on TPE soon, I'd be okay if XC was only every two hours north of Newcastle, maybe even only hourly north of York - the stock is required elsewhere.
Well these sound like excuses to not provide much additional rolling stock over what's provided at present
Well, if the new EMT franchise requires bi-modes to replace 222s then I can't see where else 222s would go but XC.
XC don't need to provide (many) more services than they currently do - XC *do* need to provide longer services than they currently do.
the reason for the frequent service to Scotland up the East Coast was the axing of XC up the West Coast
The service north of Newcastle was three/day in BR days - like the current EMT service to Leeds, it was a southbound way of getting HSTs out of the depot in the morning and a northbound way of them returning late at night.
Operation Princess saw Virgin turned that into an hourly service, back when they were also running an hourly WCML service (bi-hourly via Warrington, bi-hourly via Stockport).
XC leaving the WCML route to Scotland happened years later.
From that, I wouldn't be too disappointed if they cut some station calls - journeys can get really bogged down with calls at Wakefield, Chesterfield, and Tamworth, and I'm not even massively in favour of so many services going via Leeds. However, it's absolutely imperative that Paignton services don't go
So you want them to keep serving the town of Paignton but not serve the city of Wakefield?